CHARLES RIVER ANALYTICS, INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) is a vital strategic concern, as adversary submarines can pos

Description

Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) is a vital strategic concern, as adversary submarines can pose considerable danger to U.S. forces and seaborne lines of communication. The undersea environment is complex and variable, and provides advantages to ASW threats. While relevant surface pictures can emerge rapidly, ASW threat information is often intermittent and ambiguous. ASW Commanders (ASWCs) must incorporate both incoming information and meta-informationqualifiers related to contact data, such as ambiguity, timeliness, or localization uncertaintyto maintain the awareness needed to detect and react to easily overlooked ASW threats. Providing better displays requires not only enhancing existing contact visualizations/plots based on a model of the ASWC"s decision process, but also including more advanced displays for visualizing complex information essential to this decision process. To address these requirements, we propose to design and demonstrate the feasibility of a service for Adaptive Rendering Through Intelligent Situation Assessment Techniques (ARTIST). ARTIST uses agent-based reasoning models of the expert ASWC decision process to adaptively drive the display and filtering of essential information and meta-information. Our approach incorporates enhanced contact displayswithin the constraints of existing displaysand new, innovative displays for visualizing complex information not currently available to ASWCs but nevertheless essential in their decision process.